


an autobiography in red

by swu



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4846169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swu/pseuds/swu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shaw paints, but it looks more like an attack. She wields her brush like a hammer, cracking white walls open until the world bleeds red.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is literally just me rambling about a headcanon that Shaw likes to paint based on the fact that there was an easel in her old apartment. (It was more likely just something of an appropriate height for lampholding, but maybe also she paints). Root shows up at the end, so there’s a little Root/Shaw, but mostly this is a story about Sameen.
> 
> tw: some mentions of blood and self-harm

i.

The first painting Sameen ever made was with a stick in the dirt outside her parents’ house when she was four, not of anything in particular, not so much drawing as _digging_ down and out and down, seeing how deep she could go.

One time she spent hours scribbling on a page until it shone black, wood pulp under an even, flawless layer of graphite. Only she could never get it quite even, couldn’t quite fill in all the gaps, couldn’t get the sunlight that reflected off the graphite to stop telegraphing each stroke she had made, each line that indicated she had been there, had had a hand in it. So she kept adding layer upon layer, pressing down into the paper, down into the wood of the pencil, until the skin of her blackened fingertips burned where it rubbed against the page and the pencil tip broke straight through and left a deep gouge in the desk underneath. Her mother pressed a brush into her hand the next day.

ii.

She couldn’t explain it, really. It didn’t make much sense, her with a brush in her hand and paint permanently embedded beneath her fingernails—she liked watching sports games with her father, she liked going to the park (there were dogs there), she liked running and being outside and feeling the burn of the sun on her skin (and in her lungs and in her legs). She had a succinct list of things she enjoyed; this was never supposed to be one of them. And yet somehow to her it made the most sense of anything at all.

The thing that drove Shaw to paint was the same thing that kept her hands balled into fists constantly, even when she wasn’t paying attention, even while she slept. It was always bubbling beneath the surface, begging to be dug out and splattered across a surface and left out to dry, left behind. If it was on the canvas, it wasn’t inside her anymore. She never could get those fists to relax, but at least they felt better wrapped around the handle of a brush.

It was digging. Down and out and out, digging out of herself but also inward. It was seeing but not being seen, leaving a mark but no one had to know it was hers. It could be detailed and precise and tight tight tight, the laser focus on getting it just right muting everything else that existed in the world until it was just her and the colors and the digging into the canvas to carve the emptiness out. But it could also be the loudest, most reckless thing imaginable (at least when she was younger, before the guns and the cars and the flammable substances). It was opening herself up and digging something out of herself—seeing it for the first time, but also leaving it behind. Sometimes painting with cadmium red felt more like painting with her own blood.

iii.

Shaw learned to paint with different tools later on—with a scalpel on flesh under bright surgical lights; with flying bullets and bodies lying in her wake; with skidding tires blackening asphalt. With just the right combination of chemicals that made the most beautifully vibrant explosions when mixed just right, colors of flame that seem like they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in nature dancing against the night sky. With her fingertips and nails and teeth digging bruises into flushed skin, stark and glowing against dark satin sheets. But there’s always paint, too. When she’s alone in the dark, when there are no warm bodies or guns or knives or flames to paint with and it’s just her and digging into the blackness again. But even when she’s not, even when there _are_ bodies and knives and flames, it always feels like painting to her, always feels like that first time with the stick in the dirt, digging and digging.

(The smell of gasoline reminds her of turpentine sometimes. She used to forget to use the odorless kind, the mineral spirits you’re supposed to use instead of the strong stuff. Her parents didn’t know any better when she was a kid and somehow the fumes ended up being a comfort to her. It was better painting with the windows and doors thrown open anyhow, less claustrophobic, like somehow you’re moving even though you’re still rooted to the spot in front of your easel.)

iv.

She likes seeing the marks she’s made. She likes knowing that they’re there, that they exist just because of her and just for her. That no one else has to know, like it’s a secret between her and the universe, one without words because, honestly, those were never really Shaw’s thing.

v.

Sometimes a canvas is too small to hold all the secrets that she has. Too small but also too open, too visible. One day, some time after settling down in her apartment in New York, after the first time she died but before the second, in a fit of frustration she grabbed a glass jar filled with a deep crimson and chucked it at the wall. It was satisfying, the shattering, watching the paint drip slowly toward the ground, carving rivulets into the clean white until it found the grooves between the bricks, carving down and down and down.

Sameen started painting on her walls after that. She would meticulously tape down plastic drop cloths over the floors (refinishing concrete is a bitch) before she attacked the brick, wielding her brush like a hammer—it looked more like she was cracking it open, the four walls of her apartment like inside of her skull, like the edges of the world, and the world was bleeding red and red and red. Apparently Michelangelo said that he discovered his sculptures within the blocks of stone; that they were already there, already whole, and he only uncovered them. (Of course he would. Dead white dudes love to think they’re bestowing some gift on humanity, uncovering secrets, putting them on display like that’s some favor they’re doing.) To Sameen it’s not a discovery, not some pure sacred thing to reveal to the world. It’s an exorcism. It’s the opposite of whole, it’s violent and raw and cracked into pieces; it’s not carving away the excess to uncover the purity underneath but pushing _through_ , pulling out what’s inside until what’s left is empty, open. It’s the opposite of a hard form in stone. It’s a negative, it’s space, it’s the ability to breathe.

Shaw liked her apartment. Liked knowing the white of the walls that she repainted each time held secrets that were just for her. Liked knowing everything she could never say was not tearing at itself inside her, but instead was watching her always. Somehow that felt more peaceful to her; the room always felt more open after.

vi.

The rest of her world is grey concrete and black metal and black tank tops over black pants; she covers it, layering black upon black upon black, trying to get it flawless and even, trying to hide the color underneath so no one would know it was even there.

vii.

Being locked in the subway was a bitch.

She was already in the ground, but she had nowhere to dig; these were walls she couldn’t crack, buttressed on all sides by miles of soil. How anyone could expect her to breathe down there was beyond her.  


viii.

What was worse, though? That came after Shaw died (the second time). Surprisingly, the belly of the beast is home to no blood or fire or red, only white upon grey upon white and nothing to mark it with. She was alone again, just herself and her hands and the white white hospital sheets, no bullets or scalpels or bodies, not even a stick and a patch of earth. After a while she felt like screaming (or she would have if she were anyone else; Shaw never did have a taste for melodramatics, or ones that didn’t involve firepower, anyways). But she wanted out, out of this place, out of her skin; she wanted to crack open the sickeningly white tiled walls and feel the world bleed again, feel the beat of its pulse in time with hers. She wanted to gut Samaritan and leave its broken shell smeared red across the earth.

But she was alone, and she had nothing. No one pressed a brush into her hands, not that she could do much of anything with her hands anyhow, strapped down as they were. She couldn’t breathe, needed to carve out a space and let the air in, needed to dig out her rage and leave it behind lest it consume her, but the only surface she could reach was her own skin. And so she dug. Hands balled into white-knuckled fists turned into fingertips gouging into the flesh of her palms turned into nails painting bright red rivulets all over her body. She cracked herself open because Samaritan had shrunk her whole universe down to just the skin covering her bones, and the universe always did feel too small for her.

But that secret wasn’t hers anymore; it was bright and glaring, the marks like stigmata out in the open for everyone to see. When they saw what she was doing they upped her sedation, added paralytics, added… other things she couldn’t identify. In her mind the drugs swirled together and mixed with the red of her blood, the needles painting tracks on her arms, only these were pushing the demons in, filling her up with them until they could wind their fingers around her neck and strangle her. Their grip tightened and tightened until she could feel herself hardening to stone, black and black and black with nothing underneath.

ix.

She doesn’t remember how she got out. She felt like she hadn’t been able to breathe in years and when the walls of the earth finally cracked open, when the air flooding in hit her hypoxic brain, somehow it felt like drowning all over again.

But she does remember this:

She remembers the jagged fissure that broke through the walls, through the inside of her skull, through the edges of the world, and Root standing at its center, storming in on a wave not of red blood but of ichor—pure and blinding, nothing and everything, the white of all the colors in the universe at once swirling together.

x. _after_

Sameen paints bruises and scratches and blossoming red onto Root’s skin. Digging and digging, digging a space but wanting for the first time to fill it instead of letting the world bleed through its cracks, wanting to crawl inside and stay there. After digging into herself for so long, digging into Root feels like breathing. She doesn’t know what that means, doesn’t have the language to describe it. Her language is red and red and red (and blue veins and white teeth and purpling bruises that fade to green)—colors that seem like they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in nature, dancing on glowing skin pulled taut over heaving ribs.

She likes seeing the marks she’s made. She likes knowing that they’re there, that they exist just because of her and just for her. That no one else has to know, like it’s a secret between her and Root, one without words because, honestly, those were never really Shaw’s thing.

 

 

* * *

 

 

> [a lesson in stigmata:](http://daedalians.tumblr.com/post/111308851770)
> 
> hands brushing wildly in the dark;  
>  the complex archeology of wounds

 

 


	2. expression

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write Shaw painting Root and somehow my brain thought all of this was necessary. I have no idea if this makes any sense at all, it's probably a mess and possibly just one giant mixed metaphor… but anyways here is more Shaw x painting introspection that no one ever asked for or wanted :)

**ex·pres·sion /ikˈspreSHən/**

Sameen has never really thought about painting people before. Not because she doesn't do it—she’s painted a lot of people, actually. People are technically challenging to paint and Shaw is nothing if not up for a challenge. It’s just not something she ever really thought about.

Sometimes Shaw needs to paint with the full force of her body, violent and loud, gashes dripping red like blood spatter. But there are other times, too, when she needs the quiet—that laser focus that would otherwise only come in those rare moments in the OR or, later on, while stitching up a gunshot wound in a safe house somewhere. Those are the moments when she can finally tune out all the noise and just appreciate the delicacy of the movement, the finesse that’s required to get it exactly right. It isn’t always bleeding on the walls, attacking them with a brush like a hammer. There’s a time for a hammer and a time for a scalpel, after all.

Painting people was Shaw’s scalpel time. She never painted anyone she knew, not really. It was always random clippings from magazines, the occasional surveillance photo of a number, glimpses of strangers across an aisle on a long-haul train ride. Sometimes, very rarely, a one-night stand. (If they had a really nice face. She generally made it a rule not to, but sometimes when there’s a really nice face in front of you, it would be a waste to not appreciate it properly.) Her subjects were always anonymous, always selected for the lighting or the angles, the objectively well-structured skull or chiseled torso, or sometimes simply for the _challenge_. It was always just a face or a body; the person to whom it was attached was irrelevant.

She burned the canvases afterward.

Early on she’d tried reusing them, scraping the paint down and gessoing a thick layer of white over whatever remained, because there was actually something cathartic in that, too. There was something comforting about concept of _returning_ to the tabula rasa beyond the comfort of the blank slate itself, like if you chipped away all the paint, you could scrape a person, a life, all the way down to its canvas and start over.

The concept never quite translated to reality though. It was never enough. Painting on those old canvases, with ghosts lingering beneath the fresh gesso, Shaw never felt clean. Even if not an ounce of the old paint remained, she still felt the weight of it between the stretcher bars. There’s no such thing as returning to a blank slate, Shaw decided. You’ll always see what was on it before.

So she started burning the canvases. Burning the ghosts of the people she’d met—the people who, despite Shaw’s best efforts, lingered behind the faces she painted. Burning the people she’d been.

It was always the same for Shaw: paint, combust, repeat. Painting people was no different than painting rage on her walls. The result didn’t matter. Sometimes (in her calmer scalpel moments) she’d step back afterward and appreciate the good work she’d done, the same way she’d appreciate a beautifully stitched wound, suture perfectly aligned, the tension in each stitch just right. Sutures removed, the skin would heal over to leave a barely noticeable scar, or, if she’d had a really good day, no scar at all. No evidence that they’d ever existed in the first place.

 

1\. _the act of making known one’s thoughts or feelings_

Unsurprisingly, Sameen always found it strange, the way other people talked about art. The way paintings would hang revered in museums and galleries; the way artists talked about their work as if it was a window into their very souls, their hearts laid bare for the world to see; the way artwork was _shared_ , as if the artists wanted that, as if that was the intent of their creation in the first place, as if art, for them, was always meant to be for someone else.

For them painting was about other people, the people they painted for and the people they painted. Parents, siblings, friends, children, lovers. They painted people they cared for, people they loved. They painted them precisely because they loved them. The way they talked about it, painting someone was meant to be an act of reverence, of worship almost. Apparently sometimes the act of painting was worship in the literal sense, if the hundreds of portraits that men have made throughout history depicting ugly-ass babies who were supposed to be the infant Christ are any indication. But for Shaw, even just some nameless painter’s portrait of his nameless wife was too holy. That act seemed like devotion to a divinity as well, only the god you loved was flesh and blood and sitting right in front of you. Only the divinity you worshipped was love itself, as if it were a tangible thing that stretched between two people and could be captured on a canvas.

There was no space there, not the way the rest of the world understood art. No distinction between creation and devotion, no separation between church and state. It was worship, if not of a person then of that _emotion_. It was a fanatical, desperate grasp at the expression of some heightened feeling.

There was no space there, and it was suffocating. Shaw would walk into an art museum and immediately she couldn’t breathe. She used to visit them on occasion, in another lifetime, because if you grew up with a brush in your hand then that was what you were supposed to enjoy doing. Whenever she had some free time while on assignment abroad, she’d force herself to head to whatever museum that city was famous for. Because there must be some reason everyone keeps raving about the goddamn Mona Lisa, right? Might as well go see for herself. And besides, her mother would never forgive her if she didn’t visit the Louvre at least once. (Though to be fair, the Louvre was actually pretty fun; it’s not every day you get the opportunity to break into the most visited and highly secured museum in the world.)

But in those airy, brightly-lit, high-ceilinged rooms, Shaw would walk from painting to painting in a haze, stopping in front of each one to stare straight into so much… something. And it would stare back. Faces and brushstrokes and colors blurred together until any aesthetic appreciation Shaw might have had for the work fell away and all that remained was that _something_. The air felt so heavy with it, so thick with so much feeling, stretching out from the canvases in a palpable web of so many ghosts, that Shaw felt like she was dying (like she was already dead; like maybe she had never been alive at all).

(Plus, if we’re being honest, it was boring as hell.)

She stopped going to museums.

Still, there was no real escape from that zealous glorification of expression, not for Shaw, not for anyone who grew up in this feelings-obsessed culture. They indoctrinated them young— _paint from your heart_ , they told her. That’s the mantra every kindergarten teacher recites to their five-year-olds, isn’t it? It burrowed its way into Shaw’s brain then, and it stayed there. _Art is about expression_ , they said. About emotion. About feeling. About externalizing things that were meant to be internal, making them tangible, and offering them up in what almost amounted to an act of piety. Even when _art_ meant _scribbling on paper with markers_ , it already meant aspiration to an ideal that made no sense to Sameen, one she knew she could never reach.

There was no separation between church and state, and Shaw felt the weight of that absence. She could free herself from her own ghosts, if they ever even tried to linger at all, but her whole life she’s felt that burden—carrying the weight all the ghosts she was supposed to have.

 

2\. _the look on someone's face that conveys a particular emotion_

Shaw’s a sociopath, she’s not oblivious. People generally treat her like she’s blind to the emotion that surrounds her, as if her own lack of feeling somehow precludes her ability to recognize it. She generally lets them. (When people realize the extent of her cognitive empathy they tend to want her to do things like talk and show compassion and hug it out and _care_. Better to just avoid the issue altogether.)

But Shaw knows how to read people. She has an exceptional talent for it, actually. It’s the thing that makes her so well suited to her line of work. Well, that and her more overt proclivities, of course. She can read faces and bodies like Root reads code; the tiniest movements and shifts and twitches of muscle speak to her in a way that no one who spends their life caught up in their own feelings could possibly discern.

Oddly enough, emotion fascinates her. Not when it’s close enough to touch her in any way—then it’s annoying at best, though more often it clocks in somewhere between deeply unsettling and almost physically repulsive. But at a distance, she takes a certain pleasure in observation. As she looks in at the mess of it all, the sloppy tangled web of human emotion that most people spend their lives caught up in, she feels a contentment, a relief, in her separatness from it. Some days it verges on pride. It makes her feel powerful, sometimes, knowing that she’s in a unique position to see and understand things that others are simply not capable of perceiving. It’s a skill most covert operatives spend their whole careers, their whole lives, acquiring and honing. Shaw wields it like a weapon, like _she_ is the weapon and it’s the scope that guides her, and in her hands it’s just as deadly as any blade or firearm.

When she was younger, though, it wasn’t so much a skill as it was a means of survival. She spent her entire childhood watching. Without realizing it, she scrutinized everyone she ever interacted with—silently, almost clinically, so impassive that no one else realized it either. They took her even, steady gaze as disinterest or uninvolvement (or just plain weirdness), when in fact it was the exact opposite. She subconsciously cataloged every microexpression she ever saw, every intonation, every breath, every hand gesture, every fidget. Every emotion she ever witnessed flashing across a person’s face.

She never bothered labeling them (happy, sad, angry, afraid). Maybe she couldn’t (maybe that was one of the things she was missing, the ineptitude that people took for complete emotional blindness), but more likely she just didn’t care. She could recognize the pieces, the shape of them, the feel and weight. She could call them up on command. She had no use for the flowery terminology everyone else relied upon to describe them. She was beyond that.

When most kids were learning to put together LEGO castles, Shaw was teaching herself how to put together a human being. She was learning how to put herself together, to build the person she was supposed to be so that no one would ever again whisper _I think there’s something wrong with the kid_ when she asked for a sandwich instead of a shoulder to cry on.

It’s how she got through high school and college and med school and a good part of residency largely without incident. It’s why most people only ever saw the ambitious, brilliant student or the promising and exceedingly talented doctor. She _was_ those things, of course; she just repackaged it in a way that others could swallow. It was merely a pragmatic strategy that allowed her focus on the more important things (that allowed her to _be_ the ambitious student and the brilliant doctor, or to simply _be_ , in peace).

She wasn’t ashamed of who she was, of what she was. She still isn’t. For a large portion of that time she wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. She hadn’t yet put into words exactly how she was different, hadn’t yet been able to analyze and categorize herself as easily as she did others, so she didn’t think of this as hiding who she really was or pretending to be normal. It was simply a part of her. It was how she existed in the world, how she could make herself strong. Most people built walls of stone and steel around themselves, trying to harden themselves, trying to hide their emotions or numb themselves to the things they felt. Sameen armored herself in silk and smiles, painted emotion on her face and compassion in her body. It was exhausting, though, and eventually she realized it could only take her so far (apparently that limit was the third year of residency and a raging asshole of a chief resident). She traded that armor for the kind made of kevlar.

She never gave up her old curiosities, though. Even after she found the words to describe what she was, even after she found a place in the world where she fit and where no one ever questioned her, even after she no longer needed or wanted to paint the emotions she’d collected from others onto herself, she still collected them. She doesn’t remember whole people (she barely even registers what she observes as being part of a whole), but she collects pieces of them. She collects their expressions, but now she paints them on canvas instead of on her own skin.

Shaw spends her days watching. Standing apart from the rest of the world, she watches numbers through the Machine’s eyes, watches potential threats through a telephoto lens, watches targets through her rifle scope. She watches people as they watch her, or at least as they attempt to, and revels in the knowledge that they can’t read her like she can read them. The language that Shaw is written in is so foreign to them that she may as well be invisible, and that’s fine by her. Sameen is a shadow in the night; no one sees her, but she sees everything.

On the job, she watches - and then she follows and surveils and shoots and apprehends and kneecaps and saves. But for herself, she watches and paints. She might not be able to describe the things she sees in the terms that everyone else seems to throw around, but this is a language that Shaw knows how to speak. With a brush in her hand, Sameen traces every wrinkle and frown line and glint of light off an eye or a bicuspid, recording the things she sees in oil like the Machine does in ones and zeros. She paints people’s faces, their expressions, like Vesalius sketched their organs. It’s just anatomy. It’s understanding how people work, pulling them apart and seeing what they’re made of. An expression is nothing more than skin and bone and muscle, and to Shaw, sometimes painting one feels like nothing more than painting a still life.

 

3\. _(in medicine) the act or product of squeezing out or evacuating by pressure_

Where anatomical still life turns to portraiture, where an amalgam of facial expressions turn into a whole person (someone with a life and a past and a whole mess of emotions inside them)—that’s where Shaw falters.

 _Why do you paint?_ , people ask her, on the rare occasion that someone finds out about her artistic inclinations. Apparently “because I like to” isn’t an adequate answer. (“I’m a sociopath. You people intrigue me,” doesn’t come off so well either.) Apparently when most people talk about painting and expression, they’re not talking about recording skin and bone and muscle in oils; apparently the expression they’re talking about, the expression that painting is meant to capture and reflect, is supposed to be your own.

_Why do you paint? What does it mean to you?_

Sameen has spent her whole life painting; she had a brush in her hand long before she’d ever touched a block of C-4 or an automatic weapon or the wheel of a car. But she’s never called herself an artist. The term feels foreign in her mouth, uncomfortable, a little repulsive even. The words artists use to describe their artwork and their lives have no place in Shaw’s vocabulary, in her world. Every placard in every museum that she’s ever set foot in detailed the expression that each painting supposedly captured, chronicled the emotion that plagued the artists’ lives. Shaw’s not an artist.

When artists talk about inspiration, at least in Shaw’s experience, everything seems to stem from an almost superhumanly heightened ability to feel. They feel more, in a deeper and more all-consuming way, than any human should be able to, or should have to. And that’s why they need to paint; that’s what drives them, almost compulsively, to paint; and that’s also why they are able to paint the way they do. They way they describe it, that’s their secret ingredient, the magic that allows their art to transcend its time and place and mere physical presence. Apparently that’s why millions of people spend hours and days of their lives walking through museums and standing in front of paintings and _crying_ because they’re so moved.

(They can’t feel the ghosts like Sameen can, she thinks. Maybe there’s too much life in them, so much life that nothing can touch them. Or maybe the ghosts simply don’t weigh on them the way they weigh on Shaw; perhaps they’re a comfort, even—echoes of people’s past love that feels at home in their bodies and fills their lungs like air.)

To everyone else, art is about capturing that overwhelming emotion, caging it in a canvas-sized package, and invariably sharing it with the world. A painting is a physical representation of that _stuff_ inside them, an expression in the most common sense of the word.

Often when Shaw is compelled to paint, it’s actually also a direct and immediate response to an overwhelming… something. Emotion, maybe. An emotion that’s inside herself and therefore one she can’t examine objectively from a distance. An emotion she can’t pinpoint or identify or understand or put a name to, one she has no ability or desire to capture or share. It’s something heavy and powerful that pushes outward from inside her, that burns in her chest and up to her throat. It chokes her until her mind is numb to everything else in the world but that _something_ —that’s when she has to paint.

For Shaw, though, the act of painting doesn’t emerge _from_ the emotion so much as in spite of it. Its purpose is to counteract the emotion, to pull it apart again into pieces that Shaw can read and understand and categorize, in order to reestablish order in the perpetually increasingly chaotic universe (you know, entropy; the second law of thermodynamics). And in these moments of chaos, she is her whole universe. Trapped as she becomes by the small rumblings of emotion that she has no idea how to comprehend or control, by the ghosts that her body rejects like foreign tissue, it’s all she can see. There’s nothing bigger, there’s no way out. The universe shrinks down and down until nothing exists beyond her own body.

In those moments, sometimes it feels like nothing exists inside her either. Sometimes it’s like Shaw isn’t even there (within her body, underneath her skin, inside the universe) at all. Emptiness within and emptiness without. When she paints then, it’s just physics. Anatomy. It’s just images entering her eyes translated into movement of her hand, bypassing her brain entirely—the exact opposite of expression or emotion. It’s emptiness, it’s quiet, it’s order. It’s nothing at all.

Most of the time, painting doesn’t feel like creation. What results from the act is irrelevant. What Shaw expresses isn’t an emotion or a feeling (or an idea or anything else). Sometimes when she paints, it only feels like expression in the way that you’d express pus from a wound.

 

4\. _(genetics) the process by which a gene is manifested in the phenotype_

Sameen has never really thought about painting people before, but she’s thinking about it now. About painting one person. And that’s terrifying.

She feels it in her body, a physical pull like the one that draws her lips to Root’s, like the one that draws her body in front of Root’s at the sound of gunfire in the field. She’s comfortable with these pulls now. She feels them (responds to them, obeys them) instinctively, before she even registers the conscious thought in her mind. At this point they’ve become muscle memory; they’re comfortable and familiar and something Shaw can recognize even if she can’t quite explain why they exist. (You don’t have to be able to explain why basic laws of nature exist or how they work in order to recognize and accept that they do. Most people take great comfort in the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun, no knowledge of physics or laws of universal gravitation required.)

When everything else fades away, though, when they’re both sated and calm and Root is safe in Sameen’s bed, that other pull remains.

Root always falls asleep easily, stretched out between Shaw’s sheets. Shaw would, too, but she’s taken to keeping herself awake. Root looks so peaceful when she sleeps. Shaw doesn’t think she’s ever seen Root so quiet—when she’s awake, even when she’s silent and her body is still, her face says so much so loudly it’s almost deafening. She can never stop, just feels and feels right at the surface of her being until she's bloody and raw and utterly spent.

It calms Sameen to see her like this. It’s easier. It isn’t until Shaw’s lying there with her head on the pillow next to Root’s, their noses inches apart, that she realizes just how hard it is for her to look at Root most of the time, to _really_ look at her. Holding her gaze is like trying to win a staring match with the sun when Shaw’s been nocturnal her whole life. Root is so _much_ of something that Shaw has only ever seen the barest reflections of before, and it hurts. It burns to look at her, but Sameen is so tangled up in the mess of Root that she does anyway.

Shaw just looks at her. She isn’t watching Root sleep, she’s just… looking. She catalogs every angle and curve of Root’s face, every tiny mark on Root’s skin, every place the moon casts a gentle shadow or dusts soft light over Root’s features. She looks, and she sees Root and Root and Root. No matter how tired she is, she stays up after Root falls asleep because she could never do this otherwise—could never lie in bed facing Root, could never be this close to her, could never bear to look at her this long.

Sometimes when they’re lying like this, her hands rise to Root’s face and she doesn’t even notice until her fingertips are almost touching Root’s skin. Her hands want to trace the slope of Root’s brow and the bridge of her nose; they want to run her fingertips over every millimeter of Root’s face like it’s written in braille, like all they want to do is see the way her eyes do.

She never does though. She catches herself and pulls her hands away before they make contact, because that touch would break whatever it is that stretches between them in the night, whatever it is that stretches inside Shaw and lets her stay.

Root is something she can’t read, not like she can read everyone else. To Shaw, Root is blinding; to Root, Shaw thinks, she is blind. Or some days it feels like she is, at least. When she lets herself be. She wonders if other people go through their entire lives like this, if the whole world is as bright and blinding to them as Root can be to her. (She wonders how they can stand it.) She wonders if Root can look at her and read her code like she reads everyone else’s. She wonders if Root looks at her and sees some brightness in her, too.

But Shaw doesn’t worship Root, not even close. This she knows for sure. She watches Root when she speaks to The Machine, sees the love in her eyes and the devotion in the curve of her lips. Sameen’s never actually seen this before, she realizes, not in person. Not in _a_ person. She’s never gotten close enough (never let herself, never wanted to). But she can see it radiating out from Root, and for some reason she doesn’t mind standing close enough to feel it too, warm and heady where it touches her skin.

Shaw finds herself wanting to paint her. And not just because Root is beautiful (she is), or because, in a certain light, her skin has a fascinating translucency that borders on incandescence and Shaw thinks it would put up a good fight if she tried to paint it. Not just so she can spend a few hours roaming the contours of Root’s body in firm strokes on canvas. The thing that’s compelling her is something else entirely.

She doesn’t want to capture Root. Root is something that should never, could never, be contained. Sometimes the boundaries of Root’s being seem so nebulous that her skin shimmers where it meets the air, every millimeter of her vibrating with energy that pushes out and out and out. Root is a million things at once, she’s fragmented, and Shaw knows this. But at the same time, Sameen looks at her and can’t see anything but a whole. Root opens herself up, expanding and expanding until she contains the entire universe within her, so that nothing exists beyond her body. Shaw looks at her and sees… everything.

Shaw can’t pull Root apart into pieces that she knows how to make sense of, that she can control or wield or tuck away in her mind. Even after all this time, even though she’s come to know Root’s body almost as well as she knows her own, sometimes she’ll look at Root and think that this woman is something she could never possibly understand.

Root’s canvas is riddled with the signs of all the life she’s lived (all the lives she’s lived). Some of them are ones that Shaw put there. But despite Root’s revolving door of aliases and identities, despite how thorougly she sanitizes her digital footprint and rebuilds herself from scratch, she carries those lives with her. They’re part of her. She soaks them in, swallows them up. She is swimming in ghosts, but they’re so intimately and seamlessly enmeshed with her being that Shaw doesn’t know where Root ends and they begin. Maybe, Shaw thinks, she’s one of them.

When Shaw looks at Root, she sees all of her. Shaw sees everything, and when their eyes meet, everything sees her. Root looks at her and Shaw has never felt so exposed. Root looks at her and it knocks all the air out of Shaw’s lungs.

Shaw thinks about painting Root and she can’t breathe. She looks at Root and thinks about painting her. She looks at Root and she can’t breathe.

She stops looking at Root.

She stops going to the subway when she knows Root is there. She stops dropping by Root’s place, makes excuses or slips away when Root wants to visit hers. For a while at least.

But even when she hasn’t been able to look at Root in days, she starts seeing her everywhere. Pieces of her—in every taser, in every bicycle, in every word the Machine speaks—but of course with Root, Shaw can’t just see the parts. She sees Root in everything because Root _is_ everything. (Not _Shaw’s_ everything, not like that, don’t be an idiot. But the fact is Root isn’t like everyone else, she’s bigger, she’s _more_ , and it would be pointless to try and deny it.)

It never lasts for very long. Shaw finds herself in Root’s orbit again; Root pulls Shaw to her and Shaw pulls Root into her bed.

Shaw thinks about painting Root, and she thinks that maybe she got it wrong when she’d thought about what people meant when they talked about painting. Perhaps it’s not something sacred or special or unique at all—perhaps what drives someone to paint is just a pull, like the ones that Shaw understands.

Maybe it’s just a pull like all the other ones; maybe it _is_ all those other pulls. There’s no great secret. There’s nothing else to it. It’s the gravitational pull between their bodies. It’s Shaw memorizing every contour of Root’s form as she marks it with firm fingers. It’s that protective instinct, wanting to shield Root from all the shit in the world but mainly from herself, from the fire that threatens to consume her from the inside out. Wanting to let her be quiet and calm and solid enough for Shaw to touch.

It’s learning how to put together a human being. Parsing out the whole of Root, exploring all her old ghosts and learning how they form her. When Shaw stares at the blank canvas that will be Root, it doesn’t feel like starting from scratch. She wouldn’t want it to. There are marks there already, places where Shaw has etched herself into Root and Root into Shaw. Sameen feels them in the canvas, but for the first time they don’t feel like a weight. They feel like a foundation. A language they’ve already built together that Shaw never even had to learn to read. It’s part of her, and she wants to paint the whole universe in it.

Perhaps painting is like translation. Like taking the code that makes up Root and writing it in oils. Shaw thinks that maybe painting a person is just taking everything that they already are and building them up in layers of paint. With most people, everything that they are isn’t worth translating, isn’t even worth reading. But Root isn’t most people. Shaw could paint her and paint her and paint her and there would still be more to paint. And with Root, for the first time, Shaw wants to try.

There’s something powerful in this translation. It’s the expression that builds our bodies from our genes, and it feels like you could build a whole person, a life, on a canvas from the code only you can read. And the thing about this act of painting someone, this act of translation, of expression, is it’s not for them. It’s not for you, it’s not _for_ anyone. It’s not worship or a challenge or even an observational exercise. It’s just what is.

 

 

* * *

 

 

> I think of how, in Czech,
> 
>  “to paint” and “to love”  
>  are only one vowel  
>  away: malovat; milovat.
> 
>  The salutation alone  
>  is written. _I paint  
>  you, I paint you, I paint you._
> 
> – [Emily Wilson, from “Postcard I almost send to an almost lover”](http://badcode.tumblr.com/post/110379076103)

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might have stolen a line from Dollhouse, sorry (there are only so may ways you can talk about blank slates and Joss Whedon's used like all of them)


End file.
